Wireless communication is used for an every increasing variety of devices. For example, wireless communication was typically employed by wireless phones and computers to communicate, such as over a cellular network, over a local area network, to obtain Internet access, and so on. This functionality continues to expand to include an every increasing variety of traditionally wired devices, such as computer peripherals and even devices used in health care, such as electrocardiograms, temperature monitors, and so on. However, these different devices may have different functional desires, and therefore, a variety of techniques have been developed to address this differing functionally
In some instances of wireless communication, for instance, wireless media is time multiplexed for communication between network nodes in multiples of fixed time slots. The access in these time slots may be guaranteed to specific nodes or may use a suitable contention-based mechanism to arbitrate among the nodes. For example, real-time applications may utilize guaranteed time slot allocation to achieve predictable delay and avoid data loss. Since the duration of a time slot may be fixed, however, some nodes may generate blocks of data smaller than an amount of data capacity available from a single time slot, which therefore results in a portion of the single time slot from being utilized. The nature of some real-time applications (e.g., health care), for instance, could be such that the node does not wait to accumulate sufficient data to fill an entire slot before transmission, which may therefore result in inefficient usage of the guaranteed time slots.